Tsetsi: Women registering for draft will show commitment to equality

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s recent announcement that the ban on women officially serving in combat roles has finally been lifted after years of women fighting, dying, and losing limbs in combat opens more than an opportunity for women’s military career advancement. It also opens the door to required Selective Service System registration.

Since Panetta’s announcement, headlines have worried, “Will women be forced to register for the draft?” But it shouldn’t be a question of whether women will be “forced” to register; women who believe women should be in the military should be fighting to be required to register alongside the men.

For years feminists have struggled to prove women are equally viable and valuable military assets but there has been not a peep when it comes to our obligation, or duty, to serve alongside men should the need arise.

President Harry S. Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act into law in June 1948, permitting women to serve as permanent, regular members of the military. In 1980 Congress refused President Carter’s request to include women in the Selective Service registry. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1981 in the case of Rostker vs. Goldberg held that women could be exempted from draft registration because “women are excluded from combat service by statute or military policy” and “men and women are simply not similarly situated for purposes of a draft or registration for a draft.” As a result, the court held, the law’s authorizing draft registration for men only did not violate constitutional requirements of due process.

But no women are no longer excluded from combat service by statute or military policy.

The thrust of feminism is not just to be treated equally but also to be taken seriously. Until we women are also required to register for Selective Service, we continue to have the luxury of treating the military like camp. We can join if we want to, but if there’s a national crisis and the draft is reinstated, we can also backpeddle and say, “Oh, not me. I’m just a girl,” while our country’s men wait anxiously for their number to be drawn.

When presented with this argument — and I’ve made it to many people in an effort to get them to sign my WhiteHouse.gov petition asking that women be required to register — those who disagree will say, “I don’t believe in the draft for anyone. We shouldn’t be fighting to include women but to discontinue the Selective Service altogether.”

Maybe, but no one is. And until the day Congress decides to discontinue the draft again — it was ended in 1975 and re-established in 1980 — men will continue to be compelled by law to register.

From the Selective Service System’s website:

“Registration is the law. A man who fails to register may, if prosecuted and convicted, face a fine of up to $250,000 and/or a prison term of up to five years. Even if not tried, a man who fails to register with Selective Service before turning age 26 may find that some doors are permanently closed.”

Why should we women, especially now that combat roles have opened up to us, have the option to say “No, thanks” when men don’t have that option? Because we’re just girls? Feminism is in direct opposition to someone else saying, “You’re just a girl.” Why should we get to say it?

I’d like to believe that feminists/equalists as a whole will not just approve of what I’m doing but will support it and promote it and try to make it a reality.

How could we not as feminists, or at least as people who have sought equality in the military? Equality can’t be desirable to us only when it’s pretty and convenient, when it’s a benefit, when it means we get to do what we want to do but not when it means we might have to suffer consequences. As a friend eloquently put it recently, “At least some of feminism has to mean renouncing the few unfair privileges women do enjoy.”

I know I couldn’t respect myself if I would argue for a woman’s right to be in the military or to be assigned to combat duty while being content to let men shoulder the burden of the draft. I might as well insist on having the right to leave the sidewalk by myself as long as there’s a man nearby to carry me over the gutter puddle when it rains.

__Kristen J. Tsetsi is a staff writer for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn. She submitted a Selective Service registration card in January. Draft registration cards can be found at post offices and the Selective Service System’s website, sss.gov. The site does not permit women to complete registration, but printable forms can be found at http://www.navarrocollege.edu/forms/SelectiveServiceRegistrationForm.pdf.

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“Equality can’t be desirable to us only when it’s pretty and convenient, when it’s a benefit, when it means we get to do what we want to do…”

Yet that was the whole point of the women’s movement. Otherwise, they would have called it the Equal Rights and Responsibilities Amendment.

The first thing a boy learns on the playground is “you can’t hit a girl, but she can hit you.” The draft is the grown-up extension of this. We say, “Oh, well…”, and the girls, “Thank God!” We take it in stride.

The author is to be commended for her commitment to consistency, but the lack of any comments in fifteen months tells me this minicrusade is going nowhere. As it should.